TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: WaPo: Second wave of health-insurance disruption affects small businesses. “When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies. But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.”

Plus: “If they do it one way, the word canceled gets attached to it. If they do it another way, they say they are amending the policy. It sounds more gentle but it’s the same thing.”

FIRST WINDMILLS, NOW THIS. WHAT HAVE THE GREENS GOT AGAINST BIRDS? Incandescent bulb ban leaves bird care centre with dim hope. “The incandescent light bulbs use more power, but they are also warmer and serve an important role inside incubators.”

Have I mentioned that there’s still time to stock up?

THOUGHTS ON COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM, from the comments to a post yesterday:

Want to be compassionate to people? Get them jobs. That means hard-nosed Washington budget decisions, and tax cuts. Deep tax cuts.

That’s how you care about people. Jobs are 70% of everything. Public health, suicide, crime, the list goes on. Employed people have better outcomes on all of these measures than unemployed people. Want to help someone? Get him a job.

I’ve stopped a couple of social workers dead in their tracks with this reasoning. What’s the number one indicator of health, happiness, etc? It’s a job. Most social workers will (sometimes grudgingly) admit this. OK, next step, what creates jobs? Tax cuts. Talk about the Laffer curve.

Leftie-mind-blowing conclusion? Tax cuts are the best public health measure. I’ve gotten wide-eyed silence from this several times, from dyed-in-the-wool Canadian socialists.

I’d like to see someone make this argument in 2016.

AT AMAZON, deals on best-selling photo printers.

Plus, up to 50% off on winter storm preparation supplies. Order ’em before the storm strikes.

REAL SCANDALS: “It is ironic that just as Washington, D.C. and New York City–the two centers of cluelessness in American life–are convulsed with a mini-scandal involving lane closure on a bridge, two more major Obama administration scandals have come to light. The first is Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. We might have guessed that Obama couldn’t do worse than Adegbile’s predecessor, Tom Perez, but we would have been wrong. . . . Obama’s nomination of Adegbile is what I call a scandal. Another scandal, even more important, was revealed by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Duty. Obama ordered an intensification of our effort in Afghanistan, while admitting privately that he expected it to fail. Approximately 80% of the fatalities our military has suffered in Afghanistan have taken place on Obama’s watch, not because he was pursuing a strategy that he sincerely believed to be in America’s interest, but because he cynically calculated that sending Americans to die in a useless campaign (as he assessed it) would benefit him politically. This is a scandal approximately a billion times more newsworthy than the Christie administration’s closing a lane on a bridge.”

SAY, IF YOU’VE READ MY BOOK AND LIKED IT, please drop by Amazon and leave a review. If you hated it, please just go on about your business. . . .

NO, IT’S NOT ABOUT THE DE BLASIO REGIME: Ed Driscoll: Deconstructing Manhattan.

LOVE IT: 10 Stories That Prove Bill Murray Really Is The Most Interesting Man In The World.

Plus: “It’s worth noting that Bill Murray played Hunter S. Thompson in a movie at a time when Johnny Depp was only 17 years old.” It’s a great movie, too.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What Your Cat Is Thinking. Plus, note this: “To this day the population of domestic cats is maintained in a semiferal state by the practice of neutering. About the only males available for domestic female cats to breed with are the wildest and least people-friendly tomcats who have escaped into the feral cat population. Some 85 percent of all cat matings, Dr. Bradshaw writes, are arranged by cats themselves, meaning with feral cats.” There’s probably a larger lesson in that, which I will leave, as the old mathematics texts used to say, as an exercise for the reader.

FROM THE COMMENTS TO A POST LAST NIGHT, ADVICE TO UNHAPPY REPUBLICANS:

I suggest you actually attend your state’s Republican and Democrat party conventions (Bing is your friend). Attend every day and stay at the convention hotel, don’t be a day tripper. Mingle. Listen in the hallways and listen in the hospitality suites. And learn.

After your learning assignment, go back to your home district and ally yourself with people who think like you and are eager to act. Then get busy. It’s already 2014, if your candidate hasn’t already got a campaign committee, six figures of campaign money in a campaign account at the bank, and at least a dozen supporters other than committee members who are ready to start putting in 20+ hours per week on campaign grunt work as of this minute, then your candidate has already lost. So move on to the next best choice. And if that candidate also has already lost, move on again. Repeat until you’ve found the best candidate that can win. Volunteer for that candidate. Work hard starting Day One. You’ve got less than 11 months on the election calendar left. Time’s running out. Stop talking and get busy.

This is good advice.

HMM: Let’s Kick The Air Force Out Of Space.

So who should talk over in orbit?

The Navy should. And the result could be an even stronger American presence in space.

Like the sky and the sea, space is a commons; no state has a right to exclude others. Both the Navy and the Air Force have developed conceptual approaches to this commons.

Air Force space doctrine pre-emptively militarizes space. “Due to its speed, range, and three-dimensional perspective, air and space power operate in ways that are fundamentally different from other forms of military power,” the flying branch has stated. “Thus, air power and space power are more akin to each other than to the other forms of military power.”

But we argue that the Navy’s cooperative concept of the commons is more applicable to space than the Air Force’s concept, that the responsibility for space would fit more comfortably in the Navy than in the Air Force, and that, consequently, American pre-eminence in space can survive the end of the USAF.

Well, Starfleet follows a navy model. So there’s that.

THE FBI IS EXTREMELY GOOD AT FINDING OR CREATING INFORMANTS: Sabu wasn’t the only FBI mole in LulzSec, suggest leaked docs.

HOW YOGA CHANGES YOUR BODY. I’m focusing on upping my deadlifts and starting power cleans right now, but yoga is good for you.

TAMING THE WORKMONSTER: A New 13 Weeks Project From Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt.

AT AMAZON, New Year’s Deals in Classroom & School Supplies.

Also, deals galore in Office Products.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: DOJ: “Even-Handed Implementation” Of School Discipline Can Still Violate Federal Law If Has Disparate Impact Along Racial Lines.

MATHEMATICS IS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE: Excerpt: Is The Universe Made Of Math?

SPACE: How Many Assay Probes to Find One Ore-bearing Asteroid?

AEREO CASE GOES TO THE SUPREME COURT: “The dispute in brief: Aereo works by using a litany of antennas to gather the over-the-air TV broadcasts for a given city (yes, it still goes out over the air), then charging users $8 a month to stream this network television from one of those antennas to the user’s TV or devices, and record it to a DVR. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be at TV networks see this as infringement—Aereo taking their copyrighted programming and reselling it without their permission. Aereo says it is not illegally rebroadcasting network TV, but simply collecting a resource that’s freely available and allowing users to access it on more devices.” They won in the Court of Appeals.

A ROUNDUP FROM the Detroit Auto Show.

VIDEO: Mark Levin On C-SPAN’s Book TV.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Oklahoma may legalize things that vaguely resemble guns but aren’t actually guns. “We need to stop criminalizing children’s imagination and childhood play.” Yes, we do. But it’s sad to think that a bill like this is actually needed.

A NICE REVIEW OF MY THE NEW SCHOOL from Kyle Smith in the New York Post. He even includes a Webb Wilder reference.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 248.